NASA's Perseverance rover to explore mysteries of Mars

After a seven-month journey, NASA's Perseverance rover prepares to touch down on Mars on Thursday after first negotiating a risky landing procedure that will mark the start of its multi-year search for signs of ancient microbial life. "We know Mars had water at one point, we know that it was habitable, it could have had life at one point. That's why we're going back and looking for it," Perseverance deputy project manager, Jennifer Trosper, tells AFPTV.

NASA Acting Administrator Steve Jurczyk remarks on the possibility of having astronauts on Mars at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, shortly after the Perseverance rover landed on the red planet.

The USA's Perseverance rover has successfully landed on Mars with a helicopter called Ingenuity strapped to its belly. The Mars 2020 mission is seen as a first step towards bringing samples of Martian rock back to Earth.

The Perseverance rover has sent back the first audio clip from the Red Planet — capturing a faint Martian breeze. The longer video shows the remarkable moment the rover touched down on the surface.

Moving a few meters back and forth, the short trip was a mobility test for the Perseverance rover. It comes just two weeks after touching down on the red planet.

NASA's Mars Perseverance rover is currently sending extraordinary images back to Earth from the surface of Mars, with a Chinese spacecraft set to join it in a few months' time. We speak to Jean-Yves Le Gall, Director of France's CNES (National Centre for Space Studies), about his hopes for the latest Mars missions, his scepticism that humans will be colonising the red planet in the near future, and why the Moon is as relevant to space exploration as ever.

For nine months, a group of Swiss primary school children eagerly prepared for their ‘mission to Mars’. And then came the all-clear for lift-off to a remote ‘Mars space station’ in western Switzerland for a three-day mission carrying out experiments similar to those conducted by real astronauts.

NASA has carried out the first powered, controlled flight on another planet. Ingenuity was able to lift, rotate, and land. More complicated tests are planned in the coming weeks.

"We can now say that human beings have flown a rotorcraft on another planet!" says lead engineer MiMi Aung to her team as NASA successfully flew the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars.

The conversion could pave the way to sustaining human life on Mars. It marks the first time that a resource was extracted from another planet for use by humans.

Months after the delivery of half a million Astrazeneca vaccines, Ivory Coast is still struggling to get people into vaccination centres after suspicion and unfounded rumours have fuelled fears about getting the jab. And around 150,000 Burundian refugees are staying at camps in Tanzania after fleeing the violent political unrest in their homeland that began in 2015. Dodoma is trying to send them back, but many fear the country remains unsafe. Finally, South African film “My Octopus Teacher” schools its rivals and is named “Best Documentary” at the Oscars.